Read Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt for Free Online Page B

sufficiently for another chapel service and for study hall, at the end of which the Reverend and Mrs. Peabody bade each boy good night, and all retired.
    The regimen of the school was designed to instill self-discipline and build character. In the case of Franklin Roosevelt it definitely introduced him to a more spartan lifestyle than he had encountered before. The buildings were barely heated; during cold weather the boys wore heavy coats even indoors. On one occasion a winter gale blew open a transom in the dormitory during the night; Franklin and the other boys awoke beneath snowdrifts on their bedclothes. In spring the discomfort came from the opposite end of the thermometer. “Today is broiling, and five boys fainted in church this a.m.,” Franklin wrote his parents during a particularly warm stretch.
    Groton introduced Franklin to something else he hadn’t encountered: regular outbreaks of disease. A hundred boys living close together provided a festering ground for all manner of contagions. Most were fairly innocuous: colds, influenza (“grippe”), mumps, pink eye, earaches, assorted intestinal disturbances. But other afflictions occasioned greater concern. Symptoms of scarlet fever triggered the immediate quarantine of the patients; on the occasions when this failed to stem the spread, classes were canceled and the students sent home. (A standard precaution against the import of illness from outside the school was the requirement that students bring a certificate of good health upon return from vacations.) Whooping cough could be severe or mild, but it was so common that the school sometimes ignored outbreaks and let the sufferers—including Franklin Roosevelt during the spring of his junior year—walk around whooping.
    Franklin was neither sicker nor healthier than most of his classmates. The school doctor examined the boys regularly, recording their growth, muscular development, and vital signs. For reasons he didn’t explain, the physician concluded that Roosevelt had a “weak heart” and consequently should refrain from exerting himself excessively. The patient rejected the diagnosis. “I told him that he was a liar (not quite in those words),” he wrote his parents. And he blithely ignored the advice, engaging in every athletic activity imaginable—and a few, including a handball derivative called “fives,” unimagined by any save Endicott Peabody and his fellow Grotonians. Roosevelt received his share of whatever infections were going around. Sara sent him regular supplies of cod liver oil—a good source of vitamin D, although this particular aspect of its prophylactic powers wasn’t known at the time—and insisted that he take it. But he still succumbed to scarlet fever, whooping cough, mumps, flu, colds, and sundry other maladies.
     

     
    S ARA’S SOLICITUDE reflected not merely the concern any mother feels for her child but also Sara’s understanding that the Roosevelts weren’t the most robust of physical specimens. Franklin’s father, James, continued to decline during Franklin’s teenage years; during the autumn of 1900 James’s condition grew alarming. Sara arranged for the two of them to winter in South Carolina, but he became too sick to travel. She regularly informed Franklin of his father’s condition; Franklin responded with worried remonstrance. “ Make Papa rest, ” he wrote in mid-November. When James rallied, Franklin took excessive encouragement. “I am so glad Papa is really better,” he remarked the day after Thanksgiving. “I only hope he will be absolutely well again in a few days.”
    Probably Sara wasn’t telling Franklin the whole story; she must have known a full recovery was impossible. And in fact this rally gave way to a relapse. “I am too distressed about Papa and cannot understand why he does not improve more quickly,” Roosevelt wrote in early December. Only days later he received word to hurry to New York City, where James was staying at a hotel